Ep.2: Mental Health in Academia

Welcome back to the #iProgress Podcast

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In this episode, your hosts - Dr. Dean Fido and Dr. Craig Harper - talk you through the growing amount of poor mental health in academia and how PhD students and Early Career Researchers are feeling this the most. They discuss possible causes as well as ways to start to protect yourself and the need for cultural change.

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Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

01:00 - Prevalence of Poor Mental Health

12:19 - Potential Causes

28:06 - Overcoming Poor Mental Health

RESOURCES: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/how-say-no-and-do-it-successfully

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Topic 1 - Scope of Mental Health

- A recent online survey with 2,279 participants from 26 countries and 234 institutions reported that graduate students are more than six times as likely to experience depression and anxiety as compared to the general population (Evans et al., 2018).

- 3,659 Ph.D. students from Belgium indicate that the prevalence of psychiatric disorders is higher among academics than the general highly educated population (Levecque et al., 2017).

- The journal Nature runs a global annual survey for doctoral researchers. The survey had over 6,000 respondents in 2019 and featured a question exploring mental health. Thirty-six percent of the survey participants said that they had sought help for anxiety or depression caused by their PhD studies

Topic 2 - Potential Causes

- PhD students under-prepared for entering into the role; often undertake inductions which don’t represent role, and are expected to learn on the job

- This trails into the academic role of ECRs who are expected to juggle teaching, finishing off their PhDs, and amplifying their own research portfolio - on top of administration duties.

- Failing to say no - or not being in the position to avoid taking on new duties because of how you might be viewed. Hidden duties that don’t get mapped onto workload plans, which bleeds into spending time working in the evenings.

Topic 3 - How to Overcome

- Altering the working environment and culture of academia

- Del Carpio also raises a point that is highlighted in the 2019 Nature survey – long hours culture: "I’ve encountered people who still hold on to models of academia where you can only be successful by working long hours and weekends. I’ve even been told by a faculty member at my university that if I’m not willing to do so, I need to find a different career."

- Thoroughly preparing PhD students for the gradient in learning as they move into their post-grad positions

- Skills workshops, speakers, mentors and coaches

- Learning to work effectively from home but having resources on campus

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Music by AlphaGaming | HarrisHeller